[metafunctor]

It's not just a meme, JS was literally inspired by Scheme (garbage collection, lexical scoping, type system) and Java (some superficial syntax) and Self (object orientation).

I agree that the core language is not the worst problem with JS; that's what I was trying to say.

Regarding the other point about knowing whether something is async or not. Few languages will tell you if a function does side effects. They might spawn threads or processes, mutate the data you sent them, all after the call has returned. Languages where you can easily see that this will happen are few and far between, and they have strong static type systems.